These are undead creatures who travel into the depths in search of revenge, redemption, or just because they want to.

Mummies progress slowly in levels, half again as slowly as Humans in all skills except fighting, spellcasting and necromancy. As they increase in levels, they become increasingly in touch with the powers of death, but cannot use some types of necromancy which only affect living creatures. The side effects of necromantic magic tend to be relatively harmless to Mummies. However, their desiccated bodies are highly flammable. They also do not need to eat or drink and, in any case, are incapable of doing so.

Starting Skills and Equipment

Difficulty of Play

Mummies are a very difficult species to play. First and foremost, they cannot quaff potions. This knocks out several survival tools, some of which are especially critical in the early going. Among other things, lack of potion use also means that confusion is in effect as bad as paralysis for Mummies. Beyond this major liability, Mummies also level up very slowly, their intrinsic rF- can cause unexpected (and lethal) spikes in damage until it is offset, and their aptitudes are bad in almost everything. They cannot use many useful spells, nor helpful tools such as berserk and the various forms one can access through Transmutations.

Mummies gain intrinsic spellpower enhancements to Necromancy spells at level 13, and another stacking enhancement at level 26. In addition, Mummies never hunger and can ignore all nutrition costs (and gain). Unfortunately, these advantages usually provide little or no benefit in the early parts of the game, when characters are not yet well established, and thus most vulnerable.

Strategy

Mummies should be considered a challenge species. However, if one wants to play to their advantages (such as they are), one way to do so is by starting as one of the "mage" backgrounds and worshiping Sif Muna, as this guarantees the opportunity to make good on a Mummy's lack of hunger by exploiting Sif's channeling as quickly as possible. This can work with summoning spells in particular, as a Mummy can constantly keep a large number of summons surrounding him while still having max, or near max, MP. This type of strategy is easiest to set up with Mummies that start as Wizards, Summoners, or Ice elementalists. So long as one constantly keeps summons around—a task that Mummies reduce simply to an exercise in the player's patience—then once this strategy gets going, it can be extremely strong.

Necromancer is not a bad start for Mummies, either, and it gives you allies that do not require continually recasting one's summoning spells. Mummies are also immune to many of the side effects and miscast effects of Necromancy. Do note however that mummies unfortunately cannot use one spell that appears in the necromancer's starting book, regeneration.

Assuming you have managed to offset their rF-, high level Mummies fare well in the optional extended endgame. However, one has to survive all the non-optional parts first, during which time torment immunity does not help, and yet all the disadvantages of Mummies are as salient as ever, if not more so.

Mummies must always be careful of sources of confusion: they have absolutely no way to cure it except to let it wear off naturally, which can make confusion almost as bad for them as paralysis is for all species. While confused, you cannot use spells or scrolls, and cannot accurately or effectively use melee, ranged weapons, wands, or movement. Thus, Mummy characters should value extrinsic MR even more highly than other species, and should keep an eye out for an amulet of clarity.